All that has to happen for Microsoft to lose its oft-touted 95% dominance of the desktop is for computers to be cheap enough.
How far away are we from a solar powered piece of flexible plastic that costs $5 and has embedded in it the equivalent of a 100 MHz pentium, 32 MB RAM, 800 x 600 x 16bpp display, and a wireless satellite modem that could be air dropped en masse over every poor village on earth? Five years max? Those specs are pretty conservative and are more than enough to run linux just fine.
When hardware is that cheap, and it's clearly headed there soon, nothing will redeem desktop dominance for a company that depends on ~$100 liscensing fees.
Even if every computer user alive today still wants to spend $2k on their system and use windows five years from now, that number of users will be dwarfed by the number of $5 plastic computer users worldwide, and there goes window's desktop dominance.
Anyone have the half-life of the computer user community today (the number of years it currently takes for the number of computer users to double)?
I checked out the Libertarian Party's platform at http://www.lp.org/platform/
and could find no reference to copyright or patent laws. It doesn't appear to be a high profile issue with them.
I would say, however, that there is a lot of sympathy among libertarians with the view that enforcement of patents and copyright represent an initiation of force on the part of the government and is a violation of individual rights.
I have been a libertarian for 11 years and I certainly feel that way.
How about voting libertarian instead of democrat or republican?
Bush and Clinton have both supported the spooks in their insistence that crypto be regulated and every phone be tapped.
Nah. We want our hand-outs too bad. We would much rather watch the two parties have a pillow fight over a tax cut that amounts to 1% of GDP and accept the fact that they agree on everything that matters.
Better to let the status quo proceed to the point where we are all fitted with wireless monitors and shock collars, which would only be invoked after due process and a court order, so don't worry.
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All that has to happen for Microsoft to lose its oft-touted 95% dominance of the desktop is for computers to be cheap enough.
How far away are we from a solar powered piece of flexible plastic that costs $5 and has embedded in it the equivalent of a 100 MHz pentium, 32 MB RAM, 800 x 600 x 16bpp display, and a wireless satellite modem that could be air dropped en masse over every poor village on earth? Five years max? Those specs are pretty conservative and are more than enough to run linux just fine.
When hardware is that cheap, and it's clearly headed there soon, nothing will redeem desktop dominance for a company that depends on ~$100 liscensing fees.
Even if every computer user alive today still wants to spend $2k on their system and use windows five years from now, that number of users will be dwarfed by the number of $5 plastic computer users worldwide, and there goes window's desktop dominance.
Anyone have the half-life of the computer user community today (the number of years it currently takes for the number of computer users to double)?
That would be an interesting figure to track.
I checked out the Libertarian Party's platform at
http://www.lp.org/platform/
and could find no reference to copyright or patent laws. It doesn't appear to be a high profile issue with them.
I would say, however, that there is a lot of sympathy among libertarians with the view that enforcement of patents and copyright represent an initiation of force on the part of the government and is a violation of individual rights.
I have been a libertarian for 11 years and I certainly feel that way.
How about voting libertarian instead of democrat or republican?
Bush and Clinton have both supported the spooks in their insistence that crypto be regulated and every phone be tapped.
Nah. We want our hand-outs too bad. We would much rather watch the two parties have a pillow fight over a tax cut that amounts to 1% of GDP and accept the fact that they agree on everything that matters.
Better to let the status quo proceed to the point where we are all fitted with wireless monitors and shock collars, which would only be invoked after due process and a court order, so don't worry.
;-)
I don't suppose anyone would be kind enough to put this up on a server we could all get to to download it?